Negotiation is not only something we do at work; often the toughest negotiations we encounter are in our personal lives. Some of the most successful negotiation examples of the power of negotiation skills in dispute resolution is when they repair relationships between friends.
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Course Dates: June 2020 – Exact Dates TBD
When negotiations become difficult, emotions often escalate and talks break down. To overcome barriers and turn negotiations from difficult to collaborative, from breakdown to breakthrough, you must learn to understand the inter- and intra-personal dynamics at play. In this program, you will examine how your own assumptions and … Read More

When you expect people to be competitive, it’s not only your own behavior that changes. You also set up a self-fulfilling prophecy, such that your expectations about the other side’s behavior lead him to behave in ways that confirm your expectations.
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Deborah Kolb & Jessica Porter
Selected by TIME as one of the best negotiation books of 2015, Negotiating at Work offers practical advice for managing your own workplace negotiations: how to get opportunities, promotions, flexibility, buy-in, support, and credit for your work.
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Do you teach negotiation to students from different cultural backgrounds? Are you teaching students how to negotiate in a cross-cultural context? Do you teach a “one world” model of negotiation; or, are there cultural variables that require changes in the basic model of negotiation that you teach?
The Program On Negotiation at Harvard Law School invited … Read More

Catherine Ashcraft
Four-person, scoreable, prisoner’s dilemma game where players decide how to handle low water levels in 10 quick rounds; an adaptation of the case “Win As Much As You Can.”
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It’s often said that great leaders are great negotiators. But how does one become an effective negotiator? On-the-job experience certainly plays a role, but for most executives, taking their negotiation skills to the next level requires outside training. Designed to accelerate your negotiation capabilities, Negotiation and Leadership examines core decision-making challenges, analyzes complex negotiation scenarios, … Read More

Here are a few examples of difficult situations at work and some negotiation skills for dealing with difficult people we encounter in every area of life. First, negotiators should ask themselves: Why do some people get under our skin?
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It’s often said that great leaders are great negotiators. But how does one become an effective negotiator? On-the-job experience certainly plays a role, but for most executives, taking their negotiation skills to the next level requires outside training. Designed to accelerate your negotiation capabilities, Negotiation and Leadership examines core decision-making challenges, analyzes complex negotiation scenarios, … Read More

Sooner or later, almost all of us will find ourselves trying to cope with how to manage conflict at work. At the office, we may struggle to work through high-pressure situations with people with whom we have little in common. We need a special set of strategies to calm tempers, restore order, and meet each … Read More

Strictly limited to 60 participants who have completed a prior course in negotiation, this first-of-its-kind program offers unprecedented access to experts from Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—all of whom are committed to delivering a transformational learning experience. By working closely with them, you will:
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Creating value is the name of the game in integrative negotiations but these principles can also apply to the highly competitive realm of business negotiations. In the business world, why is competition so often the norm, while cooperation seems like an impossible goal?
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Become a More Effective Negotiator
Great leaders are great negotiators. By equipping you with the innovative negotiation strategies you need to excel at the bargaining table, Negotiation and Leadership will help you:

The working assumptions that guided health care for years are being renegotiated. Clinical practice, organizational policy, and professional relationships are shifting. How do we negotiate to manage these changes?
Renegotiating Health Care offers a valuable bridge between the growing field of negotiation and conflict resolution and the many changes facing health care. Four health care leaders-representing … Read More

As our world grows increasingly interconnected, we are more likely to find ourselves negotiating in a cross-cultural context. The diverse makeup of many societies and global nature of business today make cross-cultural negotiation a regular part of life. Also, unfortunately, many major disputes in need of resolution cross ethnic and cultural lines. Furthermore, it is important … Read More

No is perhaps the most important and certainly the most powerful word in the language. For many people, it is also the hardest to say. Yet every day we and ourselves in situations where we need to say no—to people at work, at home, and in our communities—because it is the word we must use to … Read More

Improving your negotiation skills can only take you so far – eventually you need to assess you behavior preferences as a negotiator. Being able to predict how you will behave in a given bargaining scenario will help you augment the negotiation training you have received as well as help you achieve better outcomes at the … Read More

It’s often said that great leaders are great negotiators. But how does one become an effective negotiator? On-the-job experience certainly plays a role, but for most executives, taking their negotiation skills to the next level requires outside training. Designed to accelerate your negotiation capabilities, Negotiation and Leadership examines core decision-making challenges, analyzes complex negotiation scenarios, … Read More

When two rational players face off in a business negotiation, why do they settle for less than each of them could and should get? Each pursues his or her interests as theory dictates, but often the result is less than optimal. Young proposes that the root of the problem lies in the philosophical assumptions underlying … Read More

Knowing the norms of ethics and negotiation can be useful whether you’re negotiating for yourself or on behalf of someone else. Each ethical case you come up against will have its own twists and nuances, but there a few principles that negotiators should keep in mind while at the bargaining table.
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Newly annotated edition of the management classic that proposed Theory Y – that individuals are self-motivated – as an alternative to Theory X – that employees must be commanded and controlled
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Access to multimedia content has rapidly increased throughout the world, with videos and short clips permeating our daily life. We are consuming, producing, and interacting with videos more now than ever before. In light of increasing video fluency and interest in using videos in education, the Program on Negotiation’s Teaching Negotiation Resource Center is creating … Read More

Originally titled The Shadow Negotiation — and named by Harvard Business Review as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year — this best-selling book illustrates effective ways to master the hidden agendas that determine bargaining success.
Everyday Negotiation provides insight into ways of recognizing the shadow negotiation — where unspoken attitudes, hidden assumptions, and … Read More

A town government and a private fuel-oil company have a standing contract that they have renewed for several years in a row. The contract is again up for renewal, and the town manager is under pressure from his constituents to reduce the city’s heating costs and avoid tax increases.
The city’s fuel-oil consumption has remained … Read More

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen
This 10th-anniversary edition bestseller provides a step-by-step approach to having those tough conversations with less stress and more success. Updated to include a fascinating chapter: “Answers to Ten Questions People Ask”.
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To guard against acting irrationally or in ways that can harm you, authors of Beyond Reason: Using Emotions As You Negotiate Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro advise you to take your emotional temperature during a negotiation. Specifically, try to gauge whether your emotions are manageable, starting to heat up, or threatening to boil over.
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Lawrence Susskind and Bruce Patton
Three-person, integrative, facilitated negotiation with two department heads and a Human Resources observer/facilitator regarding the possible transfer of an employee from one department to the other
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“ABC: Always Be Closing.” That’s the sales strategy that actor Alec Baldwin’s character Blake shared in the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross as he tried to motivate a group of real estate salesmen. In his verbally abusive, profanity-laced speech, Blake presented a ruthless model of closing a business deal that ignores customers’ needs and cuts … Read More

At the negotiation table, what’s the best way to uncover your negotiation counterpart’s hidden interests? Build a relationship in negotiation by asking questions, then listening carefully. Even if you have decided to make the first offer and are ready with a number of alternatives, you should always open by asking and listening to assess your … Read More

Andrew Clarkson
Two-party international negotiation between Russian and U.S. negotiators over a naval incident; teams internally prepare instructions for a representative not involved in the preparation
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Conflict in business negotiation is common, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are steps we can take to avoid types of conflict and misunderstandings. Often, it helps to analyze the unique causes of conflict in particular negotiation situations. Here, we look at three frequent types of conflict in business negotiations and offer … Read More

Many people dread negotiation, not recognizing that they negotiate on a regular, even daily basis. Most of us face formal negotiations throughout our personal and professional lives: discussing the terms of a job offer with a recruiter, haggling over the price of a new car, hammering out a contract with a supplier.
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In negotiation, all the goodwill, trust, and cooperation you create can seem useless if you and your negotiating counterpart disagree about how future events may play out. In such cases, a contingent contract can be a highly useful, though widely overlooked, tool for creating value in negotiation.
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Candace Lun and Jeswald W. Salacuse
Two-party, four-issue negotiation between representatives of two companies with different national and corporate cultures regarding a possible joint venture
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It’s a classic famous negotiations case. In the summer of 1988, National Basketball Association (NBA) team owners and players were at loggerheads over their new contract. At midnight on June 30, the owners declared a lockout, halting preparations for the start of the 1998–99 NBA season. The players and owners negotiated for six long months, … Read More

Ron Karp and Bruce Patton
Three-person distributive exercise consisting of two separate two-party negotiations between the representative of an estate and two separate coin dealers over the price of a silver coin collection large enough to affect the silver market
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Negotiation training often focuses on bridging gaps between negotiators with different styles, backgrounds, or objectives, but what about overcoming generational barriers in negotiation? Generational differences need not stymie efforts at the bargaining table. In this segment from “Dear Negotiation Coach,” we explore how to overcome cultural differences in communication with members of the Millennial generation.
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Imagine that you’re the American representative of a U.S. food company, and you’re hoping to procure a new ingredient for several of your products from a German company. A representative from the company is flying in to meet with you. Do you expect your German counterpart to behave differently than the Americans you typically deal … Read More

Question: I’m aware of lots of unresolved personnel issues that seem to be festering in my department, such as complaints about someone who is not doing his share of the work, another person whose griping is causing a drop in morale, and two coworkers who can’t seem to get along. I’m comfortable negotiating with customers, … Read More

Connie Ozawa
Multi-party, multi-issue facilitated negotiation for five or six players representing civic and business leaders and owner of a senior center regarding the expansion of other groups’ use of the center
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To avoid the pitfalls of overconfidence, you need a clear understanding of how overconfidence is likely to affect your judgments and decisions (and those of your counterparts) at the bargaining table. Fortunately, new research suggests exactly when to expect overconfidence and offers insight into how you can prevent it from getting you into trouble in … Read More

Suppose that two entrepreneurs, a marketing expert and an IT specialist, are thinking about merging their consulting firms to create a greater synergy of services. As their talks unfold, each wonders how much information to disclose. Should they bring up discussions with other potential partners?
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In 1994, the Walt Disney Company faced an unexpected succession decision after its president and CEO, Frank Wells, died in a helicopter crash. Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner believed his longtime friend Michael Ovitz, the founder and majority owner of successful Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency, or CAA, as it is known, was … Read More

The ladder of inference is a model of decision making behavior originally developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen and elaborated upon in the context of negotiation by Program on Negotiation co-founder Bruce Patton in his book Difficult Conversations, co-authored with fellow Program on Negotiation faculty members Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. The model describes … Read More

Do you negotiate via text? If you’re a young person early in your career, there’s a good chance you could easily pull up message strings full of discussions about issues and offers. If you’re a little older, you might have answered no. Even so, if you took a closer look at the saved text messages on your … Read More

Every salesperson has his or her war stories: tales of difficult customers who made extreme demands and threats, tried to take advantage, or were extremely rude. Dealing with difficult customers is inevitable in the sales world, and the question of how to handle difficult customers looms large. The following three guidelines can help you stay … Read More

In her new book, Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life (Dey Street Books, 2018), Francesca Gino, the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, argues that a healthy dose of rebellion can deepen our engagement and help us meet ourmost important goals. We asked … Read More

Without realizing it, we leave many of our most important decisions in negotiation up to chance. When talking to a potential negotiating partner, we may assume that we have met the best person possible to do this particular deal. We make tacit assumptions about whether we’ll negotiate in person, what we’ll discuss, how long the … Read More

The negotiation psychology of the parties at the table can contribute significantly to the likelihood of reaching an agreement. In Beyond Reason, world-renowned negotiator Roger Fisher and psychologist Daniel Shapiro advise “ignore emotions at your own peril. Emotions are always present and often affect your experience. You may try to ignore them, but they will not … Read More

This month, Deborah Kolb, the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women in Leadership (Emerita) at Simmons College, shares strategies that women can use to overcome pay and promotion gaps at work.Kolb is the coauthor (with Jessica L. Porter) of Negotiating at Work: Turn Small Wins into Big Gains (Jossey-Bass, 2015).
Negotiation Briefings: Past research has suggested that … Read More

David Fairman—Managing Director of the Consensus Building Institute—recently shared his extensive experience in negotiating with, and teaching negotiation to, a variety of groups from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.
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Q: I’m the head of human resources at a medium-sized company. We are piloting a program in which we will offer employees increased ability to self-schedule their hours and work from home. We’re trying to figure out whether this is something that employees really value and, if so, whether we should bring this up in … Read More

Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for productive negotiations. In this video, Guhan Subramanian, professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School, discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success. The discussion was held in his negotiation training workshop “Setting the … Read More

On August 7, 2013, President Barack Obama canceled a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled for September of the same year in Moscow, citing a lack of progress on a variety of issues.
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Many negotiation and mediation instructors draw from other disciplines for a range of purposes. Insights from social psychology, for instance, can help students understand, explain, or predict certain interpersonal and inter-group dynamics. Ideas from economics and game theory can shed light on various value-creation principles.
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In the past we have encouraged you to ‘debias’ your own behavior by identifying the assumptions that may be clouding your judgment. We have introduced you to a number of judgment biases – common, systematic errors in thinking that are likely to affect your decisions and harm your outcomes in negotiation. Learn how to identify … Read More

If you’ve ever made a decision tree, engaged in risk analysis, or created a scoring system when preparing for a negotiation, you benefited from the work of economist Howard Raiffa, whether you realized it or not. And the decisions you’ve made in your negotiations likely have been far smarter as a result.
Raiffa, a Harvard Business … Read More

Do you teach students how to structure a negotiation process while helping them to develop the emotional acuity necessary for building relationships with counterparts? Professor Linda Kaboolian refers to this as “teaching head and heart negotiation”; an approach that was central to the 10 years she spent teaching simulation-based negotiation at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Kaboolian … Read More

Parties to a business dispute often become so focused on beating the other party that they lose sight of their most important goals. Conflict management efforts can be even more intense and seeming insurmountable between estranged romantic partners with a history of acrimony and distrust.
Consider rock star Madonna’s ongoing legal dispute with her ex-husband, film … Read More

QUESTION
I recently asked one of our firm’s managers, Joseph, to be in charge of developing an important new program. He agreed to take it on and didn’t raise any concerns, but I sensed a lack of enthusiasm during our conversation. This surprised me, as I had assumed that he would feel honored and happily run … Read More

Question
I have been in the real estate business for many years and have closed many successful deals. Over the past year, I have been involved in a negotiation over the sale of a piece of land. It’s hard for me to believe we have made so little progress. This is an important deal in the … Read More

You likely have noticed that this newsletter and other negotiation advice from the Western world tends to promote rationality, logic, and fact finding over emotional reactions or a focus on abstract concepts such as honor. This rational approach dovetails well with the values and assumptions of American and other Western cultures. But how well does … Read More

Q: I work with a group that has completed several mergers and acquisitions on behalf of our organization in recent years. We would like to assess how well we have done and where and how we might improve. What’s the best way to go about this?
A:Across all kinds of business negotiations, assessing a team’s performance … Read More

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School is pleased to present
New Perspectives on Large-Scale Systems Change
with

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld
Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations (LER) at the University of Illinois
Thursday, April 23
12:15 – 1:30 pm
Wasserstein Hall Room B010 (Basement level)
Harvard Law School
About the talk:
Broad societal challenges, such as global climate change, industrial revitalization, and personalized medicine … Read More

You may be adept at negotiating for your organization, but are you passing up career opportunities back at the office?
One of the more interesting tidbits to emerge from the December 2014 leaks of hacked Sony Pictures data was an e-mail revealing a young actress’s efforts to be paid on the same level as her male … Read More

Knowing how to manage your own internal conflicts before engaging in negotiations is an invaluable negotiation skill negotiators should develop prior to engaging in international negotiations, business or otherwise.
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When your agent negotiates on your behalf, it’s generally smart to have her keep you in the loop throughout the process with regular phone calls, e-mails, or meetings. But in a recent article in Poets & Writers magazine, literary agent Betsy Lerner identified conditions in which you might prefer to be uninformed.
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In your negotiations, have you ever faced a truly difficult negotiator—someone whose behavior seems designed to provoke, thwart, and annoy you beyond all measure?
For some Western leaders these days, the negotiator who best fits that description might be Russian president Vladimir Putin. Since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine, the Russian leader has seemed … Read More

Q: I’ve heard a lot about the benefits of developing trust in negotiation and experienced some of them myself. But in my negotiations, I find myself struggling with the question of how trusting to be. Should I always aim to be as trusting as possible?
A: In negotiation, our outcomes depend in large part on our … Read More

When parties to a negotiation can’t seem to find common ground, it sometimes seems as if the only solution is “winner take all.”
Consider the decade-long campaign by the backers of the Cape Wind project to build the first offshore wind farm in the United States off the coast of Massachusetts in Nantucket Sound. Led by … Read More

In late February, the trial of Jesse Litvak, a former bond trader for Jefferies & Co., got under way in New Haven, Conn. Litvak was charged with defrauding investors of $2 million by behaving deceptively in his trades of mortgage-backed securities in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In one bond negotiation, Litvak is … Read More

Joint fact finding is a multistep, collaborative process for bringing together negotiating partners with different interests, values, and perspectives. Here are the five stages through which joint fact finding typically proceeds.
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Q: I work for an international nonprofit that tries to eliminate “bad acts” around the world—not illegal activities, but ones that we consider unethical. We are currently negotiating with a U.S. business owner who is engaged in these bad acts. His business is generating losses, so we are trying to buy him out and put … Read More

You are given the opportunity to choose between two colleagues to be your teammate on a lengthy negotiation. As part of your decision-making process, you contemplate which individual you will be likely to get along with best.
One of your children accuses you of siding with her brother in an argument. … Read More

Zero-sum﻿ thinking emerges when people conceive of water as a fixed resource – one provided by nature in a given quantity that is either static or diminishing. Based on these assumptions, diplomats often focus on what share of the existing water will be given to each entity. Negotiations of this type typically involve decision makers … Read More

Most difficulties in water negotiations are due to rigid assumptions about how water must be allocated. When countries (or states) share boundary waters, the presumption is that there is a ﻿fixed amount﻿ of water to divide among them, often in the face of ever-increasing demand and uncertain variability. Such assumptions lead to a zero-sum mindset, … Read More

In the July 2011 issue of Negotiation Journal, mediator David Hoffman takes a thoughtful look at the role of caucusing in mediation in an article entitled “Mediation and the Art of Shuttle Diplomacy.” The practice of meeting separately with each disputant, while widespread, is not without controversy. Critics have argued that these private sessions give … Read More

Adapted from “Strength in Numbers: Negotiating as a Team,” by Elizabeth A. Mannix (professor, Cornell University), first published in the Negotiation newsletter, May 2005.
The widespread belief in “strength in numbers” suggests that having more players on your team should be a benefit, not a burden. But this belief can lead team members to underprepare … Read More

Why are some negotiation exercises still used in a great many university classes even twenty years after they were written? In an effort to understand more about the enduring quality of some classic teaching materials, we asked faculty affiliated with PON to explain why they think some role play simulations remain bestsellers in the Clearinghouse … Read More

Adapted from “Battles of the Experts,” first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
Sometimes conflict is triggered by honest disagreements over the facts. When one partner buys out another, for example, the two might disagree about the value of the business. Similarly, if a piece of high-tech equipment fails, the manufacturer might point to improper maintenance while … Read More

The PON Clearinghouse offers hundreds of role simulations, from two-party, single-issue negotiations to complex multi-party exercises.The following role simulation is a two-party, four-issue negotiation between representatives of two companies with different national and corporate cultures regarding a possible joint venture.
Scenario: MedDevice, a U.S.-based Fortune 500 company that manufactures high technology medical equipment, and Lee Medical … Read More

The PON Clearinghouse has nearly 200 role simulations on a wide range of topics. The following role simulation is a two-party, short awareness-building negotiation between a professor and a student over an assignment submitted late due to a death in the student’s family
SCENARIO: Professor Famous teaches a course on the Theory and Practice of … Read More

Adapted from “Taming Hard Bargainers,” by Robert C. Bordone (professor, Harvard Law School), first published in the Negotiation newsletter.
Suppose you’re about to face off with an “old school” negotiator whose reputation for hard bargaining precedes him. You know you’re supposed to adopt a collaborative approach for the best results, but what about when the other … Read More

Access to multimedia content is rapidly increasing throughout the world, with videos and short clips permeating our daily life – whether in gas stations, on ATMs, cell phones, or mobile entertainment devices. We are consuming, producing, and interacting with videos more now than ever before: YouTube is the third-most visited website on the Internet, the … Read More

Many negotiators understand the importance of estimating the other side’s reservation price—the worst deal he would accept from you. However, despite the fact that such estimates often are based on hints, clues, and speculation, negotiators are frequently overconfident that their estimates are accurate.
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The PON Clearinghouse offers hundreds of role simulations, from two-party, single-issue negotiations to complex multi-party exercises. The Pepulator Pricing Exercise is a two-team, scoreable, multiple round, “prisoner’s dilemma”-style negotiation between representatives of two companies over the monthly price for fictional products called “pepulators”.
SCENARIO: The pepulator market is controlled by two giant … Read More

The Clearinghouse at PON offers hundreds of role simulations, from two-party, single-issue negotiations to complex multi-party exercises. The Ship Bumping Case is a two-party international negotiation between Russian and U.S. negotiators over a naval incident. Teams internally prepare instructions for a representative not involved in the preparation.
SCENARIO: Vessels from the United States … Read More

Registration is now closed for the NP@PON Mediation Pedagogy Conference.
Professors Lawrence Susskind (MIT) and Michael Wheeler (Harvard Business School) are pleased to announce a Mediation Pedagogy Conference to be held by Negotiation Pedagogy at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (NP@PON). This two-day Conference will be held Friday, May 15 and Saturday, May … Read More

The Clearinghouse at PON offers hundreds of role simulations, from two-party, single-issue negotiations to complex multi-party exercises. Win as Much as You Can is a four-person, simplified, iterated prisoner’s dilemma exercise.
SCENARIO: This exercise is analytically similar to both the Oil Pricing and Pepulator Pricing exercises. Participants’ sole objective is to maximize their … Read More

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Preparing for Negotiation

Understanding how to arrange the meeting space is a key aspect of preparing for negotiation. In this video, Professor Guhan Subramanian discusses a real world example of how seating arrangements can influence a negotiator’s success. This discussion was held at the 3 day executive education workshop for senior executives at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Guhan Subramanian is the Professor of Law and Business at the Harvard Law School and Professor of Business Law at the Harvard Business School.